Letters
AI is progressing faster than ever. This is thrilling, yet rapid change can be disorienting. In such times, it’s useful to follow Jeff Bezos’ advice to think about not only what is changing but also what will stay the same.
Tech & Society
Without question, 2023 has been the most exciting and interesting year in technology that I’ve seen over a fairly long career. It bears mention that I’m pretty sure I said more or less the same thing at the close of 2022...
Tech & Society
One of my favourite flavours of conversation is listening to reinforcement learning experts talk about their children as reinforcement learning agents. These conversations highlight just how comically far behind humans our machine learning models are.
Tech & Society
Before this past year, when I told people I worked in AI, more often than not I was met with a blank stare and sometimes a question along the lines of: “You mean like robots?”
Tech & Society
Only a year ago, ChatGPT woke the world up to the power of foundation models. But this power is not about shiny, jaw-dropping demos.
Tech & Society
The past year has seen incredible innovation in AI, and I expect as much or more in 2024. The coming year undoubtedly will be a year of rapid progress in models – multimodal, multilingual, and (hopefully) smaller and faster.
Tech & Society
The year 2023 was an inflection point in the development of broadly useful AI systems across text, image, video, audio, and other modalities. At Runway alone, we saw the release of video-generation models such as Gen-1 and Gen-2...
Letters
Last week, I attended the NeurIPS conference in New Orleans. It was fun to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and also get a wide scan of current AI research.
The Batch Newsletter
The Batch - AI News & Insights: Last week, I attended the NeurIPS conference in New Orleans. It was fun to catch up with old friends, make new ones, and also get a wide scan of current AI research.
Tech & Society
Fans of AI-driven music pressed play, while a major recording company reached for the stop button. AI grabbed listeners by the ears when it helped produce a new single by The Beatles, mimicked the voices of beloved stars, and generated music from text prompts.
Tech & Society
Angst at the prospect of intelligent machines boiled over in moves to block or limit the technology. Fear of AI-related doomsday scenarios prompted proposals to delay research and soul searching by prominent researchers. Amid the doomsaying, lawmakers took dramatic regulatory steps.
Tech & Society
Information may not want to be free after all. The age-old practice of training AI systems on data scraped from the web came into question as copyright owners sought to restrict AI developers from using their works without permission.